Guild Wars Wiki:Copyrighted content

This page is an official policy on the Guild Wars Wiki. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow.

This policy is meant to clarify the licensing terms set forth by ArenaNet and NCsoft for submissions to the Guild Wars Wiki. Any content that is incompatible with these terms should not be added or kept. This policy applies to both text and images submitted to the wiki.

All content must be GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) compatible or belong to ArenaNet/NCSoft. Fair use and default GuildWiki content are common items not allowed.

If you are unsure about whether a submission is eligible for use here, you may post a request for comment on the contribution or ask a question on this policy's talk page.

Compatible sources

• Original content (which the contributor holds the copyright to) may be used freely on the wiki, and is consequently released under GFDL by the contributor upon editing. Images of this type should be tagged with {{GFDL image}}.
• Content in the Public Domain may be used freely, but remains in the Public Domain after use. Such images should be tagged with {{Public domain image}}.
• Content copied from GFDL-compatible sources sources may be used freely as long as the source is attributed on the article's talk page or the edit summary. The content is automatically GFDL-released upon contribution. Images from other GFDL sources should be tagged with {{GFDL image}}.
  • This applies to content dual-licensed under an incompatible license and a compatible one.
• Guild Wars content copyrighted by ArenaNet and/or NCsoft (regardless of licensing) may be used freely on the wiki. This includes content from the Guild Wars game, official website, manuals, guides, fansite kits, etc. Images of this kind should have the {{Screenshot}} (from game), {{Arenanet image}} (from website or other official source), or {{Fansite kit image}} (from Fansite kit), tag in their description, and the source the information came from should be linked to or noted when editing. This content is not licensed under GFDL upon submission, and all rights remain with ArenaNet and/or NCsoft.

Factual information from incompatible sources may be used only if it is expressed originally. This does not apply to images.

Please note that while information on GuildWiki is not registered under a GFDL-compatible license by default, some of its users have licensed their contributions under GFDL, and contributions by these users may be moved word-for-word to Guild Wars Wiki and used freely. A list of such contributors can be found here.

Dealing with copyright violations

If you come across an article which is a suspected copyright violation in its entirety and there are no legitimate versions in the article history, replace the page content with the copyvio tag: {{copyvio|<source of the infringed content>}}. This categorizes it as a copyright violation, marks it for eventual deletion (if nobody opposes), and gives a mechanism for working on a non-violating version.

For suspected copyright violations where the article history contains a legitimate version, perform a full revert to the last good version. This leaves the violation in the article history; if specifically required by the copyright holder, a sysop may delete the article and selectively restore the revisions before the violation and after the revert, to effectively remove the violation from the history.

For images which are suspected copyright violations, place the above copyvio tag into the image description to mark it for eventual deletion.